Sarah Dobrowolski, MD, PhD, FRCPC

Research

I am a clinician, scholar, and educator with a clinical focus on amputation and stroke rehabilitation. Academically, I work primarily from a critical qualitative research paradigm, and preferentially employ participatory, narrative, and arts-based research methods.

My scholarship centers on how healthism (Crawford, 1980) continues to manifest in and through health promotion and/in rehabilitation settings. Briefly, healthism is the preoccupation with health as a personal and moral responsibility; it diverts attention away from the social and structural antecedents of health and disease, and limits how we live and experience our lives more broadly. This is particularly salient for consideration in the rehabilitation context given that healthism encourages preference for normatively healthy – and able – bodies, thus simultaneously placing an unfavourable gaze upon those who are not normatively ‘healthy’ and/or ‘able.’ In this way, healthism is deeply related to ableism, which is discrimination against those who experience disability.

All this is to say, how does one promote health in and through rehabilitation contexts beyond the logics of healthism and ableism? How can rehabilitation practitioners better see into and act upon the structural factors that affect our patients' health? How can rehabilitation settings be places of resistance and renewal, toward a gentler and more generative world, for all? In sum, how do we move from a culture of healthism to one of wholeism?

These are the kinds of questions that drive my work and scholarship. I invite prospective graduate students who are similarly interested in these questions to inquire about ongoing and potential research opportunities in the areas of critical health promotion, rehabilitation, and health professions education.